How One Law Firm Mastered Attorney Learning and Development with Video

Founded in 1912, Perkins Coie LLP has more than 1,000 attorneys in 19 offices across the United States and Asia. The firm provides a full array of corporate, commercial litigation and intellectual property legal services to a broad range of clients, from FORTUNE 50 corporations to small, independent startups, as well as public and not-for-profit organizations.

The Challenge: Sharing Information and Ideas at Scale

“We were looking to energize our training efforts,” said Julie O’Brien, Attorney Development Manager at Perkins Coie. “Our firm has experienced tremendous growth over the last decade, and we were trying to find a way to scale our training initiatives and to improve the way in which we share information among our offices.”

From the beginning, the attorney development team at Perkins Coie knew they wanted to do more than simply add more in-class training activities. Knowing that formal training materials would make up only a part of the knowledge base within their firm, the attorney development team looked to social learning and video as a means to curate and share knowledge more organically — from wherever and whomever it originated.

In order to achieve this goal, they looked for an enterprise video platform that would meet all of their video training needs, from recording partner presentations to sharing key findings among practice groups. It needed to be lightweight and easy to use by an individual attorney on his or her computer, and powerful enough to capture important meetings and lectures by firm leaders and visiting experts.

The Solution: The Panopto Enterprise Video Platform

As the Perkins Coie team explored the video platform market, one solution quickly rose to the top of the list. The Panopto enterprise video platform offered a flexible and affordable end-to-end solution that would enable the firm to incorporate video seamlessly and in a number of ways.

Panopto’s recording software runs on any laptop or iOS device, and can capture video from virtually any device that can be plugged into a USB port, enabling the firm to record anything with the hardware they already have. Once the recordings are complete, Panopto’s secure, web-based video CMS enables users to upload, share, search, and manage video from just about anywhere. Most importantly, Panopto’s video platform provides enterprise-level security enabling teams to asynchronously share sensitive details, research, and insights, knowing they will only be accessible to authorized users.

Panopto’s video platform can be centrally managed with ease, its recorders distributed to any user as the firm sees fit, and the video recordings themselves can be made shareable to audiences large or small, internal or external — all with just a few clicks.

By recording and sharing video content via Panopto, Perkins Coie’s attorney development team could ensure that attorneys in multiple offices would have full access to firm training content, and that the expertise of members of the team could be made available for their colleagues to review anytime and anywhere.

Making a Library of Professional Development Content Available Firmwide

As a firm with a long-standing commitment to the professional development of its attorneys, Perkins Coie immediately utilized Panopto by uploading the firm’s extensive library of continuing legal education content in order to make all of its training videos and materials available on-demand.

As the resources were made available within Panopto, the attorney development team took the opportunity to further enhance the effectiveness and discoverability of those videos by adding in each recording’s original PowerPoint slides alongside the recording, and including a table of contents for quick reference and navigation.

After the team finished with the videos, Panopto automatically went to work to ensure that the recordings could be easily found by the attorneys who needed them. Panopto indexes the content of every video uploaded into the video library four different ways — capturing every word spoken in the recording with automatic speech recognition (ASR), every word shown on-screen with optical character recognition (OCR), every word included in every PowerPoint and Keynote slide (including speaker’s notes), as well as every word included in traditional video search fields like metadata and transcriptions.

For the first time, the attorney development team was able to present their attorneys with a complete library of training materials that were instantly searchable by keyword, making it possible to fast-forward recordings to the most relevant portions of content.

“Panopto helps us to organize, store, and deliver video so that anybody in any office can find any training materials they wish and can watch it,” said O’Brien. “Doing that, in turn, is helping us unite our offices and take advantage of our shared expertise.”

Preserving and Sharing the Firm’s Most Valuable Knowledge

With its wealth of institutional training available centrally in a secure Panopto video library, the attorney development team turned its attention to the next step in its plan to improve how the firm shared expertise.

A top priority was to capture the presentations and continuing legal education sessions the firm was already holding with internal leaders and visiting experts. To ensure the team could leverage its best recording equipment to capture any learning event anywhere in the office at a moment’s notice, Perkins Coie worked with Panopto’s team to create an all-in-one mobile event recorder.

The team built the event recorder using the Panopto-certified video capture appliance. The appliance provided a turnkey, high-performance capture station to use with the firm’s best microphones, cameras, and specialty recording devices. Its flexibility enabled firm leaders and experts to record information anywhere, thus the hassle of having to wait for a video-equipped conference room to become available.

With video, professional service firms can unite their workforces

To record and share knowledge throughout their law firm, Perkins Coie leveraged the Panopto, giving them a private, consistent, and feature-rich platform named a leader in the industry by Gartner Research. To learn how Perkins Coie took training even further through social learning and knowledge management, download the full case study.